Harp

Another family of instruments found nearly everywhere in the world is the harp. After a short lecture on harp in Asia by Fred Gales, Masumi Nagasawa performed for us on three different harps. She played first a composition of her own on the modern double-action harp. This composition showcases the various techniques available for harpists bringing out a very rich world of sounds out of the instrument. I found the following video in which many of these techniques are demonstrated.

Nagasawa then told us a bit about the kugo, ancient Japanese harp, and played a short piece on it. Kugo is usually played in an ensemble such as a Gagaku Japanese court music ensemble. However, there’s also new music being composed for it. Below an example based on some melodic material from Gagaku music. Notable in this performance is that Sugawara also uses a modern technique of playing harmonics on the harp.

The main part of Nagasawa’s presentation was about the single-action pedal harp and the transition to the modern Grand Harp with double-action in the early 19th century, which is the topic of her PhD research. Nagasawa had, nearly by coincident, found an original instrument by F.J. Naderman, the most famous harp builder of the early 19th century Paris as well as a composer and a teacher. As Marie-Antoinette played harp it was a very popular instrument among high society women of the period and there were up 16 instrument builders making harps in Paris during the period.

Nagasawa then performed a composition by Naderman on the Naderman harp. An interesting story about this composition was that Naderman wrote it for her wife. Meanwhile, however, the new double-action harp had been invented and she was encouraged to perform the composition on the new model. As she had played the single-action harp for a long time and practised her technique on it, she wasn’t very comfortable taking on taking on the challenge of premiering the new composition on the new harp. She eventually did it anyway but gave up the harp soon after.

Music Instruments in Musea and Academia in the Netherlands

This was the title of the panel discussion that closed the day. In the panel were:

The discussion began with establishing the state of instrument collections in the Netherlands and the considerable lack of attention to the study of musical instruments – organology in the Dutch universities, although it had a prominent role in early ethnomusicology. There’s also no instrument museum currently in the Netherlands and most instrument collections focus on Western classical instruments. Giovanni di Stefano is currently the only full time instrument curator in the country. He’s working in the Rijksmuseum with the instrument collection they got back in 2013 when the restoration of the building was complete. The collection had been borrowed to The Hague for 60 years.

Digitalisation of the collections – like the Music Instrument Museum Online is doing – should also help interested people find information deepen their knowledge. It currently has largely European museums participating and no instruments from the Americas. It could also use some audio samples to make the online collection really interesting.

As discussed before, due to its abstract nature it is difficult to represent music in a way that could be displayed in a conventional museum. Watching displayed instruments – perhaps with some audio samples through a headset – give a rather distant impression of how an instrument functions in real life. As the recital-lectures demonstrated, there are ways to bring the instruments alive for people to experience them.

Some instruments have thousands of years of history but are still played today. What I’d love to see in an instrument museum are more horizontal rather than vertical histories of instruments. The recital-lectures showed how some instruments – flutes and harps in this case, but e.g. drums would fit the bill as well – are played in different variations around the world. Such instruments in a way represent vast distances in space and time and when played a connection could be established.

I found this Day on Musical Instruments organised by the Arnold Bake Society very inspiring. I’ll certainly be posting back here again soon about further thoughts regarding this so stay tuned!

Coming soon!

Here are some of topics I’ve been thinking of writing about in the near future:

Post Pop

I recently ran into this term in an interview of the Dutch group Jerboah in which they described their music using this term. As prefixes like post, pre, neo, etc. tend to be used in various – more or less defined – ways by e.g. musicians, scholars and journalists, I thought it’s worth looking into. Please, stay tuned as I’ll be back shortly with some more thoughts about this topic.

Legacy

We (the western world) have inherited from the 19th century a number of ways in which we experience and think about music. I’ll discuss some of them in light of some examples I’m sure everyone can relate to as well as some of the observations Nicholas Cook wrote about already in the end of the last century (or millennium, if you will). E.g. the notions of musical genius, roles of composer, director, performer, listener, ideas about different kinds of music (art music, folk, pop, etc.).

Silence

The Finnish composer Jean Sibelius has been quoted as saying something like: “The best thing in music are the rests”. The Finnish word for rest can also be interpreted as meaning break, which renders the quotation somewhat ambiguous as it could be referring to intermission. Be that as it may, music has also been described as the ultimate art of manipulating time. The experiential opposites between musical time and “non-musical” time become apparent with e.g. John Cage’s composition 4’33” and they way in which people nowadays manipulate there experience of the surrounding world by imposing their chosen soundtrack on it through portable music players and headphones/earbuds.